When he was 14, Peter Makapela and his cousin Xolani joined scores of other schoolchildren in Cape Town, South Africa, to protest miserable conditions in the area’s schools for Black children. It was 1989, the height of public resistance to…
South African women’s soccer team success shines a light on gender wage discrimination
There is a lingering giddy feeling that comes with winning a major sports competition. If in doubt, ask South Africans. Since July 23, when the country’s women’s national soccer team, Banyana Banyana, won the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in…
White blindness is a barrier to racial justice, Boesak tells BWA
A major obstacle to racial justice and reconciliation is white blindness to the systemic nature of racism and the refusal to acknowledge and seek redemption for past and present oppression, a South African anti-apartheid activist said during the Baptist World…
As joblessness rocks South Africa, fake pastor diplomas are in demand
Chuggy’s dim bedroom has a tiny table, copies of “important documents” and what he calls his “cash tools.” They are a Lenovo laptop, laminator, printer, forgery stamps and boxes of blank paper. He works from the underworld, printing fake theology…
Hello, I’m a recovering racist
Hi, my name is Idelette, and I am a recovering racist. I am in recovery from the racist ideas that shaped my consciousness from the very moment I was conceived, amid one of the most racist social and political stories…
Nowhere near the war zone, Africans feel the heat of the Russia-Ukraine war in their pocketbooks
As the war in Ukraine continues to rage on — leading to loss of lives and a refugee crisis in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Moldova and other countries — even the African continent, thousands of kilometers away, is feeling the…
Reject ‘rule of law’ hypocrisy and demand reparatory justice
On Jan. 8, 2022, the Mail & Guardian (whose masthead asserts that it is “Africa’s Best Read” newspaper) published an opinion column by Lindiwe Sisulu titled “Whose Law Is It Anyway?” that has sparked a deep conversation in South Africa. I learned…
For Black South Africans, wearing traditional goatskin jewelry can cause bans from white Christian schools
Zandile never forgets the day her overwhelmingly white Christian high school asked her to leave classes. The offense of the 14-year-old from the Zulu tribe was donning the “isiphandla,” a traditional bracelet made out of goatskin and worn by the…
What the prophet Amos has to say about the Omicron variant
7,500 miles. That’s the approximate distance between Johannesburg, South Africa — the city where the new Omicron COVID variant first was detected — and the East Coast of the United States. It would be at least a 12-day drive or…
In South Africa, an unholy trinity — televangelists, TV stations and cellular companies
In South Africa, free analog-broadcast community television stations whose programming caters to low-income majority Black townships are broke. To keep the lights on, they take advertising money from startup Pentecostal pastors who promise bewildering “miracles” and changes of fortune for…
45 years after the Soweto uprising, religious leaders call for more racial harmony among South Africans
Forty-five years after a group of young Black students in Soweto, South Africa, took to the streets to protest an educational policy of the ruling South African apartheid government, leading to the death of more than 170 of them, the…
Apartheid in Palestine and a Christ who stands on the other side of the wall
Today, the Holy Land burns. The latest round of evictions of Palestinians from their homes in favor of the illegal Israeli settlement of the Occupied Territories predictably has led to violence which has, equally predictably, spiraled into death and destruction…